Beauty and the Beast

(1925)

A
NIGHT or two ago I was persuaded to a first
experience of The Talkies. It was explained that
life is incomplete for one who has failed to watch
a photographic story accompanied by appropriate
words from a talking machine. A wonderful
invention. It is a measure of our advance to
higher and richer perceptions.

I confess I was reluctant to go. I do not
remember that twenty years ago we were at all
excited by the "talkies"; they were not
wonderful then, but common to the week, and it was
usual to attend them, for entertainment. Not so
long ago, when our Victorian souls desired light
refreshment, we inclined to this or that
music-hall, and we went to hear Marie Lloyd talk
to us. Good talk it was, too.

Though not good enough to-day, so we are told.
We are assured it would not be good enough to-day.
We have changed. There was a time, too, when we
enjoyed witnessing a favourite conductor evoke
from his instrumentalists Beethoven in a symphony;
and then, in a dream, we could see that the
tympanist, a vague presiding figure high above the
rest of the orchestra, was Zeus himself, leisurely
beating a measure for the spheres. That
respectful silence of the listeners at the end of
it, that brief pause when only the echoes of the
music were sounding in one's mind, that was
something, too; for we do not applaud on the
instant what is noble, as though it were a trick
by a conjuror. We do not applaud because there is
no surprise; there is but wonder. Our faith has
always been that man, at rare intervals, may rise
to such a height, and when he does so we are not
surprised, but silenced.

Yet you cannot, by "wireless," see
Zeus above measuring his thunder and flashes to
the music. The radio set, that static little box
of tricks we substitute for a musician evoking
from a concert of artists the triumph of a master,
is impersonal. Not by its aid did shepherds, one
night, while watching their flocks, delude
themselves with the wild notion that the stars had
good tidings for them. Let us agree that the
little box will do what the amateur at the piano
could never do. Our ration of music, good and
bad, now comes in from the main like our supply of
water. We turn a button, and it is there. Nor
has anything to be done for it; it is as certain
as the income-tax. It also enlarges, on occasion,
the voices of kings, premiers, and presidents.
When they desire an urgent word with us they have
a means to hand which the angels did not use
because it was not there. They have that
advantage over the angels. That new ability of
the great and important to communicate directly
with us is a bond between them and the humble.
The King speaks in the kitchen. It is very
agreeable for a household to be advised by the
august voice of the Premier. Still, though while
we sit at our fireside, listening-in after supper,
flattered by a Chief of State assuring us that so
far the likelihood of war next morning need not
keep us awake, we certainly know that St.
Michael, if ever he overcame the incoherence of
the atmosphere, would not have an earthly chance.
St. Michael cannot compete with a Chancellor of
the Exchequer. If he tried to get a word through
to us we should recognize at once an improper
interruption; for we know well enough, we know it
instinctively and sorrowfully, that the message he
had for us, if any, would not come that way; it
would be a personal word.

A personal word! Nobody else would hear it;
nor might another fellow believe it if we reported
a voice from beyond. But the radio is impersonal,
and therefore it is right. All but the deaf may
hear it. It makes announcements as valid as the
public notices once less effectively posted
outside town halls, or left to the public press to
issue. It has no heart. It is common news. It
is not an intimation. It tells us that we are to
be taxed a little more, or that, luckily, we may
not have to shoulder arms for a month or two.
What we hear is a louder speaker in the
hurly-burly; the confused uproar becomes
articulate, for a moment, with the heartening
communication that the steep place is a little
less steep, and that for the time being the herd
is not rushing down. Which is gratifying enough;
yet once I met a man who casually remembered,
while lighting his pipe, that he used to know an
ancient who had shaken hands with Beethoven.
What, did the gods once live? Were they seen? Is
it possible that this earth is habitable, for
gods?

I went to the Talkies. It is no good trying to
resist. We must accept the improvements on life
made by machinery. The Engine, we are aware, is
dominant, and it rules us. We must submit to its
governance. It has deposed Jehovah. It is the
new God, the latest thing made out of our highest
thoughts, and it must be worshipped, or the
priests will certainly excommunicate us and make
our ways hard.

My town, quite near to London, of late has
added to its many new buildings a palace for the
drama of the cinematograph. Once upon a time we
had several theatres and music-halls, rather old
and shabby places, and to these we went, following
the ways of the people of old Athens, to see the
life which puzzled us interpreted by a chosen
company of cleverer fellow mortals; but the camera
has dispossessed us. Those shabby old places have
gone, outdated, mere memories now not kept by our
children.

The magnitude of this new place, which we have
in their stead, was astonishing. In central
London, not Shakespeare or Handel, not any mind of
the first magnitude, could keep it open for a
profitable month. Yet what does that matter? For
evidently the camera and the talking machine can
do it. Its vast space was filled that night,
though not, so far as I could see, with my
neighbours. I could not see what had filled it,
though full it was. Its dim gulfs were uneasy
with a stirring and a muttering, as of a tide in
the dark. Sitting near me in an immense and
dubious gloom I thought I recognized human shapes,
a fond hope which had little comfort, because
those shapes merged at no distance into an obscure
mass which was awful in its sameness, extent, and
ambiguity. That uncertain murk was not of men and
women. A doubt came that this modern palace,
where science employed its devices upon an unknown
quantity, might be a station for charging a
mysterious and inordinate power, latent there for
the Devil knew what. For the power had no eyes
and no voice. It was only a murmuring and a
stirring, as of a wind at sea at night. If the
wind should rise!

I suppose I was in a gallery. My feeling was
that I was suspended in mid-air with a multitude
of unauthentic beings. There were coloured
auroral glowings on bastions and far rafters of
night, but they did not illuminate. They had no
apparent origin; there was but a spectral waxing
and waning of colours which did not throw light on
any complete and reasonable shape. Below me was a
twilight steep of which I knew nothing but a
whispering and movement in the abyss; and ranged
on either hand were vague masks, something
human-like, that were lost in infinity, that
continued, I fancied, into the ultimate dark. I
prepared myself for a portentous and apocalyptic
drama. I felt sure it would be that; I should get
no human communication there. But there was a
bare chance I was not absolutely sundered from my
own sort, because I had a suspicion that one of
the bodiless spectres near me, one of the hovering
masks, was chewing peppermint.

A curtain rose, remotely and below, on the
diminished simulacrum of a lighted stage. A
company of acrobatic puppets appeared, and these
dolls contorted their bodies to entertain us while
we waited for the greater shadow show to begin.
On a vaudeville stage of the past such agility
would have won applause. I heard no applause
there. Perhaps spectres do not applaud puppets.
The murk about me was silent. What was there to
applaud? Puppets are not of flesh and blood;
those flgures were too distant to have backbones
and bowels, so why should they not twist their
bodies in a way impossible to a man? They were
not cheered. They vanished. Other puppets came
and sang mechanically or played musical
instruments with a virtuosity remarkable in
dummies; and they also departed in silence.

The smell of peppermint still reminded me of
old earth, and I was glad it did, for I felt
alone, and more than a little disquieted by this
vast unreality. Yet unreal? How could one be
sure it was not moved inimicably by laws that
concerned the asteroids and Saturn, but not the
meek at heart? The immensity of this interior,
which I could only suspect, the murmuring of the
power which was phantom but potent, and that
glowing upon detached bastions and cornices of
undivulged lights, were too suggestive of the
mechanistic compulsion which directs the
multitudes in modern cities into uniform herds,
orienting heads and tails according to influences
from an inscrutable Zodiac. A boisterous if
drunken laugh down below, a shout of ribald
gaiety, would have been a godsend. I could have
rejoiced in the knowledge of another lost mortal
soul.

There was a pause. I was about to experience
this new miracle of science, this shadow show with
a voice. A magic lantern threw on a white screen
lengthy indications of a great affair to come, and
of its official sanction by the State censor, and
portraits of the shadows who were
"featuring," and solemn pauses which
gave me time to read the meanings of sentences in
a two-syllabic jargon for which a child at school
would be reproved. The Talkie began.

It was my first and last. I judged that the
masks and spectres about me might more usefully
and amusingly haunt graveyards, than hover
silently at this kind of entertainment. I used to
think that the producers of the Movies had
learned, after many trials, the limitations of
their art. They knew the best use to make of
their material. They had almost reached the
point--Charlie Chaplin reached it very
quickly--where they would have seen that the power of the
cinematograph was in the allegorical
presentation of life. The magic lantern was
taking its place with music and poetry. It could
do what a great poem could not do. It could
appeal directly to the multitude, and almost
instantaneously, with an interpretative vision of
man's affairs simple enough for all to understand
and as immune from argument as the Pilgrim's
Progress. It could persuade observers to a change
of heart by a casual display of incidents in the
life of the humble, which were of destiny and
inevitable. The cinematograph, in the hands of
imaginative genius, could have excelled poetry in
its direct challenge to the ugliness in our
institutions and traditional rites and manners;
and that it was silent was the secret of its
power.

But the spell of a symbol is broken when a bore
explains what it means. The story conveyed by the
Talkie in that immense and expensive palace was
barely strong enough to support one number of an
old-fashioned penny novelette. It concerned a
despised singer, who was loved by no one but his
mother. She thought he could sing, but nobody
else who knew him thought so. We might, in the
silent drama, have assumed his loving mother was
right, yet that night, most indiscreetly, he sang.
We could hear that his mother was misinformed. We
could plainly hear a nasal chant out of a
Californian tin. In one of the shabby music-halls
of the past the soloist would have "got the
bird" for making such a noise. It is
certain, however, that the manager of a music-hall
would never have permitted him a nearer approach
to the footlights than the cab-rank. The fable
was so strangely foolish that it might have been
conceived and produced by a simple-minded reader
inspired by the serial stories which are proper to
the cheaper picture-papers; the artless child
would have supposed that to be the kind of thing
the public wants. Its sentimental tedium was as
slow as a leak of heavy stuff. Our theatres have
been diminished, our music-halls retired, and
Charlie Chaplin advised that he is out of date,
and the latest mechanism from the physical
laboratories secured by men with too much money,
in order that we should be gratified in a spacious
new building by a display less appropriate than
the label on a jam pot.

It was not possible for me to get out of the
palace at once, so I mused and regretted the past,
while waiting. I remembered that, not far from
this modern vacuous wonder of a picture palace,
with its puppets, and its dismal magnitude in
which all communion with one's fellow sinners was
lost, I had heard Marie Lloyd for the last time.
It was in a dingy little music-hall. You could
have recognized a friend in its remotest corner;
and the hall was full that night. Marie Lloyd was
coming.

I had never seen her, but I knew the legend.
When I was a boy I had heard men gossiping in an
office, who should have been intent upon ledgers
and commercial documents, and the subject which
animated them more than duty was a young lady,
unknown to me, but probably most attractive, named
Marie Lloyd. One of the men would lower his voice
when he came to the point of an anecdote, and
presently they were all loudly gay. Not seldom in
later life stories about her were enticingly
outlined to willing listeners, so that she was
shadowed forth, and it was easy to believe she was
a character. Still, here I was in a suburban
music-hall, in another age, and Marie Lloyd,
though gifted with the complete art of femininity,
would be getting on. I thought that night, while
waiting for her, that I must be all too late for
her full charm; I was expecting too much. A lanky
figure in a diminutive bowler hat, his trousers
too short, his loose hands and wrists dangling
well beyond his coat sleeves, with a cane, and a
red nose, appeared on the platform. He tottered
round it in agitation twice, and then stopped to
inform us that his wife had gone away with the
lodger. He made a song about it. Nobody present
seemed to suffer very much, perhaps because they
had heard something like it before. Another man
followed, and jeopardized a number of dinner
plates. The audience maintained its amiability.

There was some hesitation on the part of the
management--the stage remained empty too long,
while the audience murmured its expectancy and a
growing impatience. Then an electric Number 10
suddenly flashed beside the proscenium.

The audience stirred, became quiet, and settled
itself. The orchestra played an air which
everybody but myself appeared to know well.
Interrupting the music, a woman, wearing a dress
that was an absurd caricature of the raiment
supposed to appertain to a naughty lady, paraded
insolently to the footlights. She only looked at
us, in handsome weariness. There was a merry call
from the gods. She sang a song in careless
confidence, a little hoarsely, making hardly a
movement, except of a shapely arm and an eloquent
hand; sometimes there was a show of an ankle,
which a woman might give who could do more, but
merely wishes to annoy us. This was Marie Lloyd.
Nothing was certain about her then except that my
neighbours were fully under her control. She knew
them, but she was as indifferent as a sultana in a
tedious court. She lifted slightly her cloud of
silk, mocked us with the prelude to a dance, and
abruptly left us, with a grace that was
contumelious. Just as she reached the wings she
turned her head, and gave us a look.

The immediate cry of delight which greeted the
empty stage did not take me unaware. It is
possible that I was in it. It is not easy to be
dumb when taken by a glad surprise. If this was
elderly Marie Lloyd then she was eternal youth.
Age she would never know . . . but was this
all? For she could do more than this. Would she
come again? We could wait. It was far from
midnight; or next morning would not be too late.

She appeared again, but I was not prepared for
her. I knew at once I had not seen her before.
Who was she now? A little shabby London woman,
whose household was flitting, and somehow she had
taken the wrong road. She had been following the
van, but had lost it. She was carrying the family
linnet in a cage, and a handbag. She was tired,
too, and I suspect she had been thirsty. She
complained, in a droll way, in a language known to
that house, of her tribulations. We laughed with
her. What was she now? She was London. She was
all the Cockneys. We laughed at ourselves.

Yet what is a Cockney? It is so hard to say
that you will rarely find one in a book. There is
Sam Weller, but not enough in literature to give
Sam adequate companionship. The Cockney is a
dangerous subject, and betrays most artists and
authors. He is nearly as old as the Chinaman, and
is something like that fellow, because of the
antiquity of his civilization and its stress. He
has worked for two thousand years, and still
works, so he does not expect much. He is a
hereditary unbeliever. He resists conversion to a
new faith; the gods have upset his apple-barrow
too often. He has seen the death of many kings,
and of so many great causes that he thinks it
enough if he can keep his own barrow on two wheels
for one day. He is sentimental, but protects his
easy pity with a dry derision. He wears the mask
of a cynic, and comments on affairs through
restrained lips. Things have so often gone awry
for him, notwithstanding the laws and the
prophets, that it has ceased to be amusing; but
this has given him patience, and his philosophy a
bleak humour. He loves his fellow men, but has no
faith in them; he has seen too many of them, and
too much.

How did Marie Lloyd convey this, and more?
Well, how did Dickens manage it? And how often
has Dickens been born again? Marie Lloyd,
somehow, held communion with us. She did not have
to speak. When she assumed that we knew, most
certainly we knew, and laughed. As a Cockney lady
who had lost the van conveying her household
goods, which was a grievous thing, though not
without its fun, she would hesitate in an
explanation of the accident, tongue-tied, and at
once our sympathy flowed. Or she would, failing
in her tired state to understand what it was she
really wanted to do, ask us an innocent and
irrelevant question. It was our own moving job
that was lost. But when she came, not to the fine
points of conduct, such as the way one may
innocently behave after several calls on a dry
road in the hope of conjuring up a heart
refreshed, but to the elements of life, Marie
Lloyd's deranging candour would have moved Sir
John Falstaff to one of his grand and moving
periods. Her sallies shocked the house into
surprise as deep as silence, just before it shook
with the fun of it. We had heard the truth, and
knew it almost at once. We understood each other
better, as we went home.

But here was this new great palace, and a new
age, and The Talkies. Now we are separate in
heart, though our bodies are herded; not
Londoners, Cockneys no more; we are the mob,
through the irresistible magic of another machine.
Science assembles us, art does not unite us.
Influences that in a new jargon are called mergers
and syndicates have deprived us of contact with
the artist. We gape, and hardly know why, at a
distant and bloodless wonder. We have grown
distrustful of what is within ourselves; for that,
we have learned, is no longer of importance.
Space and science insulate us from the sympathy of
humane communication. And there is no
compensation for our loss. Our ways of life,
under the compulsion of mechanical powers with
which it would be useless to argue--they have no
heads, as kings had, to be cut off--are shaping us
into flocks with the same faces, the same wool,
and the same desires. Our heads instinctively
turn in one direction. We are losing our personal
oddities and characteristics, for these are of no
use, and are even dangerous to flockmasters. It
is becoming hard to tell one sheep from another.
We read the same newspapers, are prompted by the
same loudspeakers, dance to the same music, and
stampede before decisions not our own. There may
be more than we think in that myth of the Gorgon's
head; but instead of into stone its modern victims
are changed into mutton.